Advantages

Reliability

Disadvantages

really good monitor at a good price - pity that the stand is rubbish

I picked up this monitor for £180 from Argos 3 years ago but I notice you can buy it for £115 nowadays. When I bought it, it was at the cheaper end of the price spectrum for 22 inch monitors but still offered just as much as the more expensive models in terms of spec.

With the exception of the silver stand the monitor is totally black. It looks fantastic and is still getting compliments from friends to this day.

Setting it up---------------Setting it up and using it is very easy. Connect the power via the standard kettle lead, then plug the vga cable in the monitor on one end and the back of your computer on the other. With Windows XP the monitor picked up straight away so I did not do any kind of install but I did find that the image was not aligned centrally on the monitor. This meant that half of the Windows Start button was off the page. I tried playing around with the options under the monitors Menu button but then noticed an Auto button, One click on this improved the brightness and centralised the image - how easy was that?! By all means have a play with any of the buttons on the underside of the monitor to go through the menus but you will probably not need them, in all the time I have used it the Auto button has done the trick every time. I have found the a resolution of 1240x1040 works best. You can go to finer resolution but the icons become very small when you do this.

Using it-----------The power button on the bottom right of the screen turns it on. You will notice that the image quality is great and the screen is anti glare, meaning you can watch a film on a bright day without having to close the curtains. The large screen size means that you can easily have 2 or more programmes running side by side without any of them being too small to use. Also the colours are fantastic - the blacks really are jet black and when using it to watch films the image quality, colours and contrast are better than on my TV.

The one slight disappointment is that the stand only tilts up rather than down. Its great to tilt it up when you are sat at the desk but I like to watch films on it from the comfort of my settee and to get it to tilt down I have to prop up the back with books. There is also no way to adjust the height.

Conclusion--------------A really good monitor at a good price, it's just a pity that the stand is so basic.